Gift of the artist
Estimate $8,000 - $10,000
Glenn Ligon’s conceptual artwork explores race, gender, and identity. His artworks often examine cultural and social identities through photographs, historical texts, popular figures, and so on. Self-Portrait at Nine Years Old is part of a series in which Ligon used images of his childhood music idols to represent himself as a child. This paper-pulp print depicts James Brown created through black dots on a baby blue background. In an interview with David Drogin, Ligon said, “It’s not simply about a kind of identity formation in the sense of ‘these are people I want to emulate.’ It was more about, ‘these are the people who are speaking to me at the moment.’”
